The first question isn't hard. You know that the date is always going to be 8 characters long and its at the end. So you can use that in your calculations. The length of the name is going to be the length of the field minus 8. Use that result with the Left() function to parse out the Name. The date is always the right-most eight characters, so I would save that to a string and then parse the string out into year, month, day and pass that to the Date() function to convert it to a date variable.

The second question can use InStr() to find the first space in the string. Then use that number (minus 1) and you have the length of the salesperson number and that can be used with the Left() function.

Viola!

I'm typing this in off the top of my head without testing any of it....

NumberVar SpaceLoc;
StringVar SalesNo;
SpaceLoc := Instr({Cal.Company}, " ");
SalesNo := Left({Cal.Company}, SpaceLoc-1);

No ideas without being able to play with the data. It's a fairly easy formula so I would think that something trivial is being missed here. I would suggest taking it one step at at time and learning how the function works. Create a formula that just returns the Instr() value and pass it different strings. Then look at the return values to see how your string data works with it. Then you'll probably have an "aha!" moment and see how to change the formula to make it work. What I gave you should be correct, so its probably one small detail that I missed that would make it work for your particular string value.

One more question: It appears that there are leading spaces in front of the salesman id. Was this just how you typed it in the question or are there a certain number of leading spaces? That will make a big difference.